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Mozilla The Internet

Mozilla 0.9.2 Storms Out The Gates 310

Posted by Hemos from the weekend-fibre-testing dept.
Well, a lot of you were up late or up early finding out that 0.9.2 of Mozilla has been released unto the world. The Mozilla folks have also, in fine fashion, put out release notes as well.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Mozilla 0.9.2 Storms Out The Gates More

Mozilla 0.9.2 Storms Out The Gates

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  • a few things about Mozilla (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I have some thoughts about Mozilla:
    1) It's much better than it was. The last few releases have seen huge improvements each time. 0.9.2 is much better than 0.9.1, 0.9.1 is much better than 0.9 & so on.
    2) The stablity is great. Most bugs are minor weirdo ones (such as the right-click menu disappearing at times, form security notices appearing 3 times instead of once) which seem to be appearing when the programmers add new features. I know from my visits to irc.mozilla.org that handling Bugzilla's torrent of bug reports has them a bit under the weather.
    3) The whole Mozilla project is seriously lacking programmers & quality assurance people. They are simply overloaded. This is one of the most (if not the most) important open source projects, yet it is heavily understaffed. They need help really badly.4) It's simply better to browse with & more stable. I've switched to using it for my browsing.
    5) The IRC client is too bare bones & would confuse 90% of internet users.
    6) No IE for mee :-)

  • How to set the hidden prefs... (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Mozilla has tons of prefs with no UI yet (popup smashing, UA setting, and stopping of animated gifs have been around for ages). Instructions on their use can be found here:

    http://www.mozilla.org/unix/customizing.html

  • Very good - *but* some annoying little bugs (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 30, 2001 @05:40AM (#118221)
    I've been checking out most of the Mozilla builds since M8 and it is greatly improving. It renders pages well, and fast! I know most /.-ers write HTML by hand, but the Composer is also greatly improved from 4.x. Mozilla will be a major competitor in the near future, but there are a couple of annoying little interface issues (and yes, I have submitted bug reports):
    • The same icons are used for Mail/News and Navigator, so when minimised, sometimes "which one's my mail window?!" becomes a problem. It only requires the Mozilla developers to add 2 words somewhere, but it's still not fixed [mozilla.org].
    • In the "Tasks" menu, the "Mail" entry is used to access the mail and news client. With such a poor description you could be thinking Mozilla doesn't have a news client.
    • The release notes [mozilla.org] say "The preferences dialog now allows you to turn off animated gif images or set them to only animate once". And where is this animated GIF preference? In the Privacy and Security category... right...
    • Not interface-related, but it is very annoying that Mozilla only imports 4.x profiles during profile migration, in the mail client [mozilla.org].
    Seems like there's a bit of the "it's 'only' the interface" mentality at Mozilla. But apart from these annoying little bugs, Mozilla is great. I can't wait for the 1.0 release.
  • The tabs from Skipstone! Instead of opening many windows you just used one with a new tab for each new window. Very cool even though Skip crashed a lot.

    You may be interested in the Multizilla [mozdev.org] project, which aims to give a tabbed interface to Mozilla.

    Alex Bischoff

  • Opera-like gestures (Score:5)

    by abischof ( 255 ) <alex&spamcop,net> on Saturday June 30, 2001 @05:57AM (#118223) Homepage
    If you're interested in support for Opera-like gestures [opera.com], please vote for [mozilla.org] bug 76537 [mozilla.org] (of course, you'll need a free Bugzilla account [mozilla.org] to vote).

    In case you're not familiar with the feature, Opera has gesture support. For instance, to reload a document, just hold down the right mouse button, and move the mouse up then down. Or, to go back a page, hold down the right mouse button and click the left mouse button ("forward" is just the reverse: hold down the left mouse button and click the right mouse button).

    Alex Bischoff
  • Personally I think it's a memory problem, the extra memory needed (under windows, I've never seen this under linux netscape/mozilla/galeon) is just too much. When this happens with IE you'll notice other neat things, like icons not rendering in other apps, being unable to open up images/documents, and all sorts of other fun stuff.

    Guess the linux memory model works a little better eh Bill? :)

  • Re:My rule of thumb: (Score:3)

    by mce ( 509 ) on Saturday June 30, 2001 @05:19AM (#118225) Homepage Journal
    Then I'd suggest simply adding a "sleep 3600" to "make world" for X. You will see a whole new world of opportunities open up in front of your very eyes.

    --

  • jwz claims the idea of having a ton of shit in Netscape, and so in Mozilla, was not his (iirc). Also, at least with current releases of Mozilla, you can install just the components you want (broswer, mail/news client, IRC client, xmlterm, PSM), without installing everything.
    _____

    Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
  • Use bugzilla! It's more effective than complaining on Slashdot.

    for example:

    http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7910 8
  • The release notes *still* don't document how to install Mozilla properly on a multi-user system.

    Thanks to Ben Bucksch you will be able to find how to do that here:

    bug 74574 [mozilla.org]. It could use some more votes. (hint)

  • Despite recent Slashdot interpretations of events, MS were cleared of illegally trying to leverage their OS monopoly to gain a browser monopoly.

    No they weren't. The Appeals Court just struck down the lower court's penalty. The Findings of Fact and the conclusion that they illegally used monopoly power still stand. They tossed out the penalty because Jackson didn't hold remedy hearings and gave interviews to the media. It's still possible that once the new judge examines the evidence and documents from the previous trial, holds remedy hearings, etc. that they may still be broken up. That would be funny.

  • Each new version it is faster, better, and sexier. Check out new modern icons and scrollbars in the latest nightlies. They rule.

  • After trying all the browsers my conclusion is that what I'd like is parts of each all lumped together.

    • Give me the GUI speed of Netscape 4.7X! If I made a wishlist of browser features back when all we had were Netscape and Lynx, this wouldn't have made the top ten. But lack of GUI responsiveness makes browsing like putting tabasco sauce in a wound.
    • Give me some cool features and the Gtk interface of Galeon. I like Gtk (though I don't think Motif is as bad as some folks think), and things like temporary bookmarks are great.
    • The tabs from Skipstone! Instead of opening many windows you just used one with a new tab for each new window. Very cool even though Skip crashed a lot.
    • The size of Opera. I just bought a SDRAM 128MB dimm for $18, but I still like small programs that start and close fast and don't hog resources.
    • Mozilla's rendering engine. It seems to handle everything you throw at it. Not a very easy task considering everything is written for IE these days.
    • Konqueror's team of programmers. No matter how good the browser is today, somebody has to maintain it. And despite the fact that Konq does nothing spectacular, it does a good job in all areas: responsiveness, size, stability, design, usefulness. And it all started from int main() not too long ago.

    What's sad is that Mozilla is SOOO close to being a great browser. It just lacks the good GUI (good in the sense of responsive, fast, and usable), which has improved some over the years but not enough to give hope that things will radically change.

  • ironically, as people are screaming
    about how the moz team is adding too many features...

    Well, I wouldn't say screaming ;P But, I can see their point - I'd rather have the devteam concentrate on tightening the code, and fixing existing bugs before they go and add more features. Once the existing bugs get squished, however, it'd be nice to have something like this.

    One thing I would like to see (outside of the roll-your-own system) is some sort of componentized download - so if I wanted just the web browser, and nothing else (mail/news, composer, etc...) so I could download a smaller file, and have a smaller memory footprint, compared to someone who uses the mail client and/or the composer, who could trade a larger download/memory footprint for those extra features.

    I'm actually very happy with the stability improvements over the past few months (I download nightlies twice a week) - the devteam has been doing an excellent job at bugsquishing =)

  • It's not a memory problem. Sadly, Windows 98 is still using graphics and UI systems derived from Windows 3, with internal tables limited to 64K in size. Windows 2000 doesn't have this problem.
  • That would be 35 MB of virtual memory, which will gradually get moved into your swap-file.
  • Actually, the Mozilla UI _is_ written in javascript.
  • Actually, most of the Mozilla workers are employed by AOL to do Mozilla.
  • Depending on where you upgraded from, you need to remove all of your mozilla files, all mozilla things in c:\windows, and all Mozilla registry entries.
  • The reason why I use NS/Mozilla clients under Linux is that Balsa, et al don't support HTML-formatted mail, making them almost useless for me. I can deal with not sending HTML mail, but every other e-mail I receive these days is HTML-formatted.

  • Mozilla shrinking (Score:5)

    by cluening ( 6626 ) on Saturday June 30, 2001 @06:01AM (#118255) Homepage
    Although it is rather unscientific and probably unrealistic, I have noticed one good sign about mozilla as I have downloaded each release: as of late, mozilla download have been shrinking. When new features/code are continually added and the size of a program gets smaller, I take that as a good sign. For example, here are the sizes of the Linux x86 full .tar.gz file over the releases since 0.6:
    • 0.9.2 - 9.2 M
    • 0.9.1 - 9.4 M
    • 0.9 - 9.4 M
    • 0.8.1 - 11.0 M
    • 0.8 - 11.0 M
    • 0.7 - 10.5 M
    • 0.6 - 10.5 M
    The .8's jumped a little, but notice how the .9's picked up the slack. I think this looks quite good to me...
  • Probably.

    However, Protozilla [mozdev.org] is a powerful, externally-developed add-on that solves the problem and allows you to do lots of other stuff.

    It's unlikely (read: not going) to get added before 1.0, but the author of Protozilla has hopes of getting Protozilla added as a standard part of Mozilla at some point (read: when he can convince the guy who'd be in charge of adding it to add it).
    Steven E. Ehrbar
  • Check out our own website if you have a fast connection, specifically: this page [geizhals.at], and this page [geizhals.at]. We keep the HTML very trimmed and the pages load quickly (IMHO) after the images are in the cache. I tried to change between these 2 pages several times using Opera, MSIE 6.0 beta and Mozilla 0.9.2, and while the page itself is rendered quickly with Mozilla, there is a noticeable delay before anything appears on the screen.

    You can see similar effects with very lightweight pages such as heise Newsticker [heise.de], where the pages load quickly with all other browsers, but for some reason there's a delay with Mozilla.

  • Answer is simple my friend.

    Use a proxy, and log everything. (-;
    Humm, then you could run a log analyzer on it, and have a nicely formated html output of the day. Never forget a URL again.
    Best part you can filter out those nasty ads, and speed up your surfing.

    --
    I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce. ~J. Edgar Hoover, attributed

  • Mozilla comes with a powerful configuration tool called gcc, which combined with an editor, can be used to change every facet of the programs behavior.

  • Wouldn't it be nice to have the Mozilla code be packaged into "components" of a size somewhere between 100K and 1MB!?!? An installer should then be able to download only the parts that have changed from build to build....

    (Offcourse this is a feature that brings advantages to those users of the nightly builds, only - I assume that, every of these parts changes from release to release quita a bit)

    Your post should not have been modded down. Moderators, remember you are supposed to be commenting on the quality of the post, not expressing your agreement or disagreement with it.

    As far as incremental download goes, that is a packaging issue and not something the mozilla development team should be expending time and energy on. If you want to set up your own mirror to offer incremental downloads, go ahead ;-)
    --

  • The release notes *still* don't document how to install Mozilla properly on a multi-user system.

    I just put the binary tree in /opt, permit the whole thing read everybody, and put this script in /bin:

    cd /opt/mozilla
    ./mozilla Works fine.

    --

  • Stable now (Score:5)

    by SurfsUp ( 11523 ) on Saturday June 30, 2001 @06:55AM (#118268)
    My wife has switched to Mozilla, that says a lot. One week now and zero crashes.

    However, somewhat to my amazement, the keyboard input is unable to keep up with typing speed on a 233 MHz machine. It takes some talent to design such a topheavy keyboard input stack.

    Some browsers (opera), recognizing the fact that crashes do happen, are now saving the window/url chain state so they can resume more or less where they left off. Mozilla isn't doing this, and should. Besides taking the sting out of crashes, it lets you shut down without worrying about losing all your windows. This is a big deal, for a small amount of programming effort.

    The bottom line for me is, the Lizard is here, and here to stay.
    --

  • Well, Mozilla has more code in it than Linux kernel.
    It was not only written from scratch but it was
    held up by Nutscrape releasing code that Mozilla had
    to give up bit by bit because it was so ugly.
    It has gotten to a usable and quite competitive
    state since 0.9.1.
    I personally am more disappointed that they are
    now rushing Mozilla out the door to 1.0 status.
    A recent mozillazine article by Gervase Markham
    proposed to not imporve stability or speed from
    current levels, just to ensure standards
    compliance and call it 1.0 release. That's what I
    think is wrong with Mozilla. They should take
    their time, freeze features and then release a
    perfect (i.e. fully bug-free and speed optimized)
    browser when it is ready.
  • -Mozilla is getting there on GUI speed. Certainly
    my Windows install at work is as fast as NS 4.75.
    -If you like Galeon, use it. Aphrodite may also be
    what you want.
    -Multizilla is the project for you. Join and
    contribute. It's currently at alpha stage.
    -Opera doesn't do as much, so it will be smaller.
    -Agreed wholeheartedly.
  • Two things, The problem isn't jsut horizontal... Load a large image and scroll left to right, and you'll see what I mean.

    The other thing is, on the three machines I have it only happens on one of them. The machine it happens on has XFree 4.0.3 and a TNT2, while the other two have XFree 4.0.2 one with an ATI Rage pro and the other with a Matrox something or other.... Maybe it isn't a Mozilla bug.
  • Netscape, and mozilla have has this forever. For instance. Try holding the right mouse button, then moving the mouse to your right and slightly down, let go. = Back
    Hold down right mouse button move slightly right and down about and 2 lines worth, let go = reload.
    Once you get used to these "gestures" you can speed up your browsing experience dramatically. BTW I'm not kidding. Try getting used to the back context menu and a quick guesture, and you'll find yourself doing it all the time.
  • A new Galeon [sourceforge.net] release, targeted for Mozilla 0.9.2, will be released Monday.
  • Hi all!

    This message is (sadly) posted in IE5 - which, let's be honest, sucks, but I'm stuck in Windows and NS4.7 is just painful.

    I would love to try Mozilla - except that I have a really, really large back archive of mail in Netscape Messenger which I can't afford to lose. I can't find an answer anywhere, so does anyone know if I can run NS4.7x and Moz 0.9x in parallel under the same OS install without causing problems?

    Thanks,
  • Hey, Roger! How did I come up first, I wonder?

    Anyway, thanks for the advice. Think I'll still back up my mail first, but nice to know it works.

    And that I've got someone to blame in the event that it stuffs up ;-)

    Thanks,
  • Mutt will understand a .mailcap, and can thus be used to configure lynx for reading HTML email. Very nice indeed.
  • you can turn this off Edit|Preferences|Navigator|Smart Browsing|Enable Internet Keywords. you will still have to tab to the search item on the popup to initiate a search. I believe you can edit the location to change the keyword lookup to take you to Google's 'feeling lucky' results instead of Netscape's database results. To do this try editing all.js (found in C:\Program Files\Mozilla\bin\defaults\pref for me) to replace the netscape URL with a Google URL

    --Asa
  • 0.9.1 is old. 0.9.2 is better (don't know if we have a fizzilla build yet). right now fizzilla doesn't come with PSM (security module). This should change very soon and fizzilla builds will also start to become available daily.

    --Asa

  • Re:Great (Score:2)

    by asa ( 33102 )
    Now, if people started to make real XUL applications... (A web browser is definitely not the best way to browse slashdot messages, for instance).

    FORUMZILLA ROCKS! [zapogee.com]

    --Asa
  • I'm not sure what you're talking about. Every time I've installed Mozilla, it's worked with one minor tweak. I install it to a directory as a user and then edit the mozilla file (it's a script). Change the following line:

    dist_bin=`dirname $0`

    to

    dist_bin=/usr/put_your_install_directory_here

    Then go back and do a 'chown -R root' on the whole directory. This works for me every time. I've been meaning to submit a bug about the annoying dist_bin change, but I just haven't done it yet.
  • One of the most irritating things about Mozilla is that I can't use it with my bank. Actually, this is probably an irritating thing about Citibank, which assumes that anything other than Netscape 4 or IE 4+ is unsupported. I can use Opera with "Identify as Mozilla 4/IE 5.0" but then Citibank's web site never loads due to some bug in the miles of JavaScript that they use.

    Is there a way for Mozilla to tell web sites that it is a different version? Obviously, I'd want this to be a toggle, but it would help me out a lot.
  • Galeon has a "crash recovery feature" that remembers openw indows.. so far they don't save histories, but they'll probably do it eventually.
  • You should try Opera. I used to use it at work, and it rocks. It definately impacted my browsing style. When I used Netscape 4, I would have 4 or 5 windows open at a time. But with Opera, openning a new window is so fast that you just do it as a matter of course. If I'm reading something with an interesting link, I just open it in a new window and come back for it later. Sometimes I would have upwards of 30 windows open -- and leave them open for weeks.

    I think your IE browsing habits are similar to my Opera browsing habits. The difference is that Opera supports that kind of hard-core browsing, and encourages it. You should give it a shot.
  • The Irix builds are contributed by volunteers who have Irix machines.

    Mozilla builds fine on Irix. Feel free to grab a 0.9.2 tree, build it, and contribute a build. :)

  • Check out the 'Recall' project... (Score:3)

    by darylp ( 41915 ) on Saturday June 30, 2001 @07:23AM (#118315)

    Some browsers (opera), recognizing the fact that crashes do happen, are now saving the window/url chain state so they can resume more or less where they left off. Mozilla isn't doing this, and should. Besides taking the sting out of crashes, it lets you shut down without worrying about losing all your windows. This is a big deal, for a small amount of programming effort.

    Well, Alphanumerica (creators of the Aphrodite skin) were working on a package called 'Total Recall', which promised just that. It's now been subverted to a generic browser plug-in called Recall, available at http://recall.mosdev.org [mozdev.org]. Worth checking out!

    There's a lot of cool projects being worked on at Mozdev. XUL is starting to look like a viable platform, now the spec's more or less cast in stone!

  • Ironically, this is the worst PITA problem with the IE on Windows HTMLAREA inout widget.

  • But now, Mozilla is much faster, more stable, and I love the standards compliance and new features.

    Are you using the Linux port? I've tried yesterdays daily and 0.9.2 and it is still more than twice as slow 4.7 to start up and much slower to render a page. I do agree that its stability is vastly improved.

    Has anyone else heard the rumor that Mozilla is written in java? I know it is not and I try to inform people who propogate this. Their confusion seems to be that Mozilla's menus are slow to appear the way swing drop down/menus are.

  • I'd say less than 50%, but I have to agree with you. The Microsoft groupie at the ISP I used to work at and I would always have shouting matches whenever he thought we should put the latest and greatest IE on our install CD and have it be the exclusive option. He won out, and tech support would have to deal with it utterly destroying several machines.

    To this day I have a machine that will run quite well (for Windows) :-) if installed with 98lite [98lite.net], but if you put standard Windows 98 on it, either with IE4 or SE with IE5, the machine will bluescreen and fry. Without IE, the machine is fine...

  • Did they do the same thing for IE?

    Slashdot requires you to wait 20 seconds between hitting reply on comments.pl and submitting a comment.

    It's been 14 seconds since you hit 'reply'!

    Just because you can't type 100wpm doesn't mean the rest of us can't. Geeze.

  • Re:Opera-like gestures (Score:4)

    by z4ce ( 67861 ) on Saturday June 30, 2001 @06:23AM (#118326)
    Personally, I think the mozilla team has some much, much important bugs. Like any bug labeled [Crash]. Let's get the real bugs fixed before we go adding gestures into the web browser.

    Ian

  • #1 Thing you can do to help Mozilla (Score:3)

    by guisar ( 69737 ) on Saturday June 30, 2001 @07:00PM (#118327) Homepage
    If you can't code- complain. I don't mean to mozilla.org they are working their butts off. I mean, complain to companies who's products exclude mozilla from operating on their web sites.

    I could reel them off- they don't recognize mozilla and/or use javascript to restrict using it with their products. Products like livelink.

    To preserve the web we MUST complain and force those companies we can to SUPPORT THE STANDARDS. If they support mozilla their code should work with IE. There's little reason anymore for products to not support mozilla, konqueror and IE. It's not tough and we deserve it.

  • Re:Quick Launch?? (Score:3)

    by jesser ( 77961 ) on Saturday June 30, 2001 @10:59AM (#118336) Homepage Journal
    Quick launch (AKA "turbo") merely preloads mozilla at startup so when you start mozilla for the first time it seems faster. In reality this is just an illusion, don't let it placate you, demand a better solution!

    It's not an illusion that with quicklaunch turned on, I can close Mozilla windows without first checking to make sure that I'm not closing the last window.

  • also opera (Score:3)

    by Ender Ryan ( 79406 ) <TOKYO minus city> on Saturday June 30, 2001 @05:35AM (#118337) Journal
    Personally, I like Mozilla, and even more than that I like using Galeon, all the greatness of Mozilla with a nice GTK interface.

    Then there is Konqueror, which, while I think it has a disgustingly ugly interface, the latest version which I just tried out yesterday is absolutely great. It renders things (IMO) almost as well as Mozilla, some things even better. It's very good, without Mozilla I might use it.

    But there is also Opera. I dislike it because it is not Free, as in closed source. You can get a free (as in beer) version, but it has a banner ad that always displays in the top. Aside from that, it is absolutely excellent. It's very fast, and (other than the damn banner ad) it has a pretty slick interface. It's definately different than any other browser interface out there, better or worse it's definately interesting. It renders html extremely well, not as good as Mozilla, and not quite as good as Konq, it seems to have a few nasty rendering bugs here and there, but it's still really great. One really great thing about it is it is EXTREMELY light weight. The version, with QT statically linked, is under 3 megs!

    Funny story, last night I accidentally rm -rf'ed my /usr/include dir while building mozilla (don't ask me how!) and was left with no browser to use, but I downloaded Opera in just a few minutes so I could keep entertaining myself while fixing my machine ; ) There's no other browser you could do that with while being stuck on a 56k line.

    Enough friggin rambling from me...

    So anyway, my point is that now we actually have multiple alternatives on Linux. Imagine that! I was worried it would never happen, but check it out, the state of browsing the web in Linux is almost on par with windows! Only thing lacking now is plugins(if you even care about that sort of thing). For those that do, there is a wine based plugin being developed by codeweavers that will allow windows plugings to be used in Linux! Quicktime, Active _BLAH_, etc. is all going to work.

    Things are really looking up. Soon Distributions will be shipping with perfectly stable IE rivaling browsers, one of the most important thing Linux has always lacked which turned away many newbies.


  • But that's probably just me. If software doesn't include the kitchen sink today it's not complete.

    You'll have to thank jwz for that. During the very initial stages of Mozilla Project planning and development, the Netscape developers were soliciting ideas from people on what they wanted in the new web browser.

    More than a couple people announced that they would like to have the browser, mail, composer, etc all as separate programs. We argued that there was no technical reason to lump them all together in one big monolithic program, especially when the users only actually uses one (maybe two) at the same time and the different parts never really talk to each other either.

    jwz told us to go to hell, the kitchen sink method was what he wanted and managed to convince everyone else of the same. Enter Mozilla.

  • Mozilla does NOT come with a powerful tool called gcc. Lay off the bong.

  • I tried experimenting with the mail client in 0.9.1 (whist 0.9.2 was downloading) and it seems very nice and complete except that it takes *ages* for the damned interface to render.

    Click on a message and it takes a second or two to actually display it. Hit Reply and you sit there wondering for awhile if Mozilla actually registered the mouse input....

    I would use Mozilla's Mail client if it were just plain faster. I've got an Athlon 750 with loads of memory, so it's not like my machine is too slow. :P Guess I'm still stuck with KMail for awhile.


  • I guess you have a point about the ability to install the different components.

    I guess what I disagree with is the fact that the framework for Mozilla (and components) is just proportionally huge compared to the parts that actually "do stuff".

    I realize they did it this way on purpose so that they could have a common development environment for all components and make it more or less cross-platform at the same time, but I wish they would have postponed the idea until they could figure out a way to do it without bloat and without slowness, which are my ONLY TWO GRIPES about Mozilla.

  • If you'd be so kind...

  • Re:got it. thanks all (Score:4)

    by Eil ( 82413 ) on Saturday June 30, 2001 @03:23PM (#118343) Homepage Journal

    What we really need is -turbo mode for linux

    Don't forget that Linux has exceedingly powerful disk caching. I've got 384MB of RAM and after I start and application once (including mozilla), it never has to access the disk to load again.

    Gotta love those unix-clone boxen.

  • Using 0.9.2 right now (Score:5)

    by AirLace ( 86148 ) on Saturday June 30, 2001 @04:56AM (#118345)
    Browsing seems even faster than with 0.9.1, and the release notes claim that 25 segfault bugs have been crushed since the previous version - not that I ever hit these bugs. The drop-down history bar which was dismally slow to update in 0.9.1 also seems a little more responsive, though I think that feature is going a little towards the bloat side of things.

    2 or 3 years ago, Linux users had every right to be concerned with the general direction of Web browsers in Linux versus The Competition. But if Mozilla development continues at this rate, we have nothing to worry about, and there is a fine alternative, Konqueror, if for some reason Netscape/AOL/Time-Warner is prevented from continuing development of Mozilla due to the new anti-GPL/viral clauses in their EULAs.

    Mozilla may never have swept away the competition, but I strongly believe that it has saved us from a much more terrible state of affairs just by existing. There are two types of Open Source success: Apache, Perl: The instant hits. Linux, Mozilla: those that steadily improve over several years, rise to prominence, and eventually vanquish the competition. Although the entrepreneurs with capital obviously want to fund the former, companies like IBM, HP and Compaq know that the latter is what will lead to eventual World Domination.
  • Quick launch (AKA "turbo") merely preloads mozilla at startup so when you start mozilla for the first time it seems faster. In reality this is just an illusion, don't let it placate you, demand a better solution!

    Tony

  • Compared with 0.9.1 running with the same settings, the fonts look terrible.

    Anyone else seeing the same problem?

    Roland

  • The release notes *still* don't document how to install Mozilla properly on a multi-user system.

    It is pretty easy.

    apt-get install mozilla

  • So then Windows loads two browsers permiently in memory, great.

    Windows defaults to ALWAYS loading IE and Office into memory permanently (assuming Office is installed). Anytime you want to use a competitor's product you will find unpleasant things from Microsoft.

    All your apps are belong to BG. And your $$.
  • No. It will not work in Unix.

    However, as unices swap to cache much more aggressively than Windoze, the second start of mozilla will be MUCH faster than the first. If you combine that with long uptime, the only difference is the lack of the box locking up...
  • I think there's a fix in hand [mozilla.org].
  • This bug is described here [mozilla.org].
  • I don't know if I would have moderated the parent down.


    But why is he downloading "the code" at all if he doesn't know what CVS is and how to use it?


    Perhaps he meant that he wanted to download the precompiled version. I have to think that almost all the files are recompiled between releases and so it would be completely impractical (for users and developers) to do what he proposes. Just download the whole thing. It's not that big of a deal even on a modem.

  • In QuickLaunch mode, when you close your last Mozilla window, Mozilla stays in memory, so if you load it again it just picks up where it left off. (Oh yeah, and on my Win2k machine, eats up 35MB RAM in /idle/ mode.)
  • The Win32 installer is giving me a checkbox "When possible, use Quick Launch for faster startup times"

    Anyone know what this does? A seach of mozilla.org turned up nothing. Having to choose stuff like this inside the installer pisses me off, because I can't get to the help yet to find out what the fsck it does.

    I mean, hey, I'm all about faster startups (ahem), but if it's an opt-in kind of thing rather than opt-out (and the fact than some people apparently wouldn't want it), that makes me kinda nervous.

  • why they called it Quick Launch in the program and Turbo Mode in the release notes is beyond me.
    But I rebooted and shore nuff, Windows took forever to load, I'm down 34 megs of RAM (out of 256), and starting up mozilla is just like hitting CTRL-N for a new window.

    The true test will be whether or not it effects my Quake game.

    Thanks again for all the responses. Cheers.

  • Quick launch (AKA "turbo") merely preloads mozilla at startup so when you start mozilla for the first time it seems faster. In reality this is just an illusion, don't let it placate you, demand a better solution!

    Heheh, yeah. "You there! Mozilla developers! I demand faster code! Post-haste! Rapidement! NOW!" If only it worked that way.

    I am completely sympathetic to their situation, but still, it's little details like this that make me remember that this is a volunteer effort and not a professional project.

  • Actually, I was referring to the bizarre documentation, not the pre-loading of code. I love Mozilla (I'm using it now, and I have been for at least a year), but 1) One does not typically see options like that show up in the install program, and 2) since apparently that option had to be set so that it could make the right startup link, I would expect the option to be better documented, and referred to in a consistent manner.
  • there isn't a *nix version of IE to compete with

    Yes, there is. IE5 runs on (at least) HP-UX and Solaris. But the HP-UX version is buggy and deathly slow, so Moz still doesn't need -turbo.

  • The problem: the little "moderate" drop-down lists start appearing at random in the page when there is a large article and I have mod privs.

    It's as though Opera can't handle a very large number of small screen objects. Netscape and (shudder) IE handle the situation just fine.

    Not always. MSIE 5.5 running atop Windows98 exhibits similar behavior ... I always assumed there was something funky with the markup of the comment pages and all those form controls, but I keep forgetting to take a snap of the page and run a validator against it ...

    Running this Mozilla article at "score=2, nested" turns up 223 errors, 501 warnings with CSE HTML Validator [htmlvalidator.com] (granted, I enable most every error check). Definitely some nesting issues with form markup present even here, though.

    That's a markup error every 380 characters, and a warning condition every 169 characters. Talk about overachieving! :)

  • As for that,
    there is a plugin called
    'Total Recall', I believe.
    It isn't shipped with the browser,
    ironically, as people are screaming
    about how the moz team is adding too many features...
    oh well.

    Dante.
  • mozilla can be started with the -turbo option which will preload Mozilla when you boot. When you actually launch Mozilla, it will come up quickly. This is a similar trick to what IE does.

    This is documented in the Release Notes [mozilla.org].

  • The size of the image on disk is not proportional to the amount of memory it will take up when running. It is the memory footprint that we want to reduce to avoid the bloat.

    Does anyone have an accurate tabulation of how the memory usage of mozilla has changed with time?

  • Wouldn't it be nice to have the Mozilla code be packaged into "components" of a size somewhere between 100K and 1MB!?!? An installer should then be able to download only the parts that have changed from build to build....

    (Offcourse this is a feature that brings advantages to those users of the nightly builds, only - I assume that, every of these parts changes from release to release quita a bit)
  • I'd like to second that. Using Mozilla on a 128MB PIII-800 running NetBSD 1.5.1, it often takes several seconds until the Mozilla GUI is paged in. (When working with other apps in the mean time).

    Next, Mozilla often just sits there saying "Resolving www.whatever.xx" in the last line, when it has already loaded data from that exact site. Kinda annoying when nothing's moving for nothing (obvious).

    And last, it would still be nice when Mozilla supported the -geometry standard X switch, or at least *something* siimlar, so I can place coordinates and a size for when it starts up. I
    don't want to use the mouse for placing Mozilla on startup. This was filed for quite some time as a bug now, but it seems it's not important enough to get fixed.

    - Hubert
  • I canot really comment on the fact if the developers' team is understaffed or not, but I'd prefer if the people would concentrate on the web browser. I know where to get a HTML Editor/Mail/IRC/whatever when I want one.

    But that's probably just me. If software doesn't include the kitchen sink today it's not complete.

    - Hubert
  • but that's due to lack of a native Flash plugin, I guess. :(

    - Hubert

  • Re:Quick Launch?? (Score:5)

    by inquis ( 143542 ) on Saturday June 30, 2001 @05:46AM (#118397)
    quick launch does the same thing as giving the mozilla binary the "-turbo" switch at the command line. it instructs mozilla to keep its libraries in memory even after the program exits. this allows mozilla to start up just as fast as IE, which keeps its libraries perpetually in memory anyway.

    -inq

  • Re:My rule of thumb: (Score:3)

    by phoxix ( 161744 ) on Saturday June 30, 2001 @05:39AM (#118411)
    So what about KDE or Koffice? Those take longer to compile than X.

    Or GNOME an OpenOffice, StarOffice, etc. Those too take longer to compile.

    Notice how those are some pretty impressive apps, that have quite a bit of functionality behind them...

    In fact, most major applications should take much longer to compile than X. Would you really want your apps to be smaller than your GUI framework? (Mind you the GUI framework just ties things together, it essentially isn't even an app).

    Have you ever tried to compile mozilla yourself? There are a billion options you can append to ./configure Which is what makes Mozilla amazing in the sense that you can customize it so well to what you want it to be like on multiple operating systems

    Think before you speak

    Sunny Dubey

  • Oh. My. God. (Score:3)

    by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Saturday June 30, 2001 @02:42PM (#118412) Homepage Journal
    The damn thing is actually stable. It actually seems more stable than IE 5.5. Not that that's saying much, but it's an important threshhold. Pity it took nearly 3 years to achieve it.

    It's probably more to the point that Mozilla is now more stable than Konqueror. It would be petty for me to compare the development time spent on the two projects. And the rendering engine for Konqueror still needs a lot of work, whereas the Mozilla's is complete and compliant. And the XML support is as sexy as hell....

    This version just might replace Konqueror (my current Linux browser) and IE. I would miss the whiz-bang features of the latter. But I did a total reinstall only a few weeks ago, and already the damn thing has managed to start misplacing memory...

    __

  • They'll be back! (Score:5)

    by uriyan ( 176677 ) on Saturday June 30, 2001 @08:19AM (#118421)

    It seems to me now that all that Microsoft has won was a single battle in the browser war. Internet Explorer was, undoubtedly, one of the best programs MS ever wrote. It was quite fast (initially), supported many of the web standards and had excellent internationalization. However, while Mozilla had to retreat and regroup, it was well worth it.

    Mozilla has now grown to accomodate many of IE's "cool" features. And here we can see IE's greatest shortcoming: it was built with corporate thinking in mind. Mozilla has an excellent development team which is concerned solely with Mozilla's good functioning as a browser. On the other hand, Microsoft has now become concerned with integrated IM, their online "services" and other features which make IE unstable and bloated.

    A couple of weeks ago I saw one of my friends (who is not deeply involved with the open-source movement) using Mozilla. The reason for his choice was the fact that Mozilla (even the earlier 0.8!) ran faster than IE 6. It gave me hope - I saw that open-source software can prevail upon commercial software in the trial of public opinion.

  • Re:Multi-user installation: here's how (Score:4)

    by rsd ( 194962 ) on Saturday June 30, 2001 @05:57AM (#118440) Homepage
    The release notes *still* don't document how to install Mozilla properly on a multi-user system.

    No it does not. But when compiling it you just need to do:

    BUILD_OFFICIAL=1 ./configure --with-default-mozilla-five-home=/usr/lib/mozilla (add all your other options here) ...

    this will let mozilla knows where it is installed and will work fine for every user on the system.
  • The problem with horizontal artifacts in images, especially when scrolling, still hasn't been fixed. *sigh*

    I really want to use Mozilla as my main browser now because it seems to work very well, but I'm a hopeless picky pedant and a bug like this that appears very prominently really keeps me away.

    This time (between 0.9.1 and 0.9.2) I did submit it via Bugzilla, but it got marked (once again) as a duplicate of an already solved bug. I guess the people responsible for the graphics rendering are having trouble duplicating what I'm seeing...

  • Re:Can I change the UserAgent string? (Score:3)

    by AlexWorld ( 216111 ) on Saturday June 30, 2001 @01:02PM (#118453)

    Add user_pref("general.useragent.override", "yourbrowserhere"); to the prefs or user.js. Works nicely on the Mac. This and other useful tips courtesy of the Mozilla end user docs [mozilla.org].

  • What about roaming? (Score:3)

    by IKEA-Boy ( 223916 ) on Saturday June 30, 2001 @05:30AM (#118459) Homepage
    AFAIK Mozilla still doesn't support roaming via HTTP/LDAP like Netscape 4.X does. This feature is enormously useful for me since I switch workplaces a lot, and between different OS's. Anyone know when/if this feature is planned?

  • OT Save context/URL trees in IE? (Score:3)

    by 3-State Bit ( 225583 ) on Saturday June 30, 2001 @08:43AM (#118460)
    Some browsers (opera), recognizing the fact that crashes do happen, are now saving the window/url chain state so they can resume more or less where they left off. Mozilla isn't doing this, and should. Besides taking the sting out of crashes, it lets you shut down without worrying about losing all your windows. This is a big deal, for a small amount of programming effort.
    I browse hard. I'll have thirty internet explorer windows open, some for a period of a week, before they get read. Every night before I got to sleep I manually cut and paste the url from each window into "current context.txt"...obviously this is a crappy solution. Anyone know of a prog that let's me save a URL tree / reload one (so that on reload all the same windows appear, and the back/forward buttons in each window point to the same place)? I tried looking for awhile and could find nothing. Thanks.
    ~

  • Re:A few things... (Score:3)

    by hwaara ( 226026 ) <hwaaraNO@SPAMgma ... inus threevowels> on Saturday June 30, 2001 @05:07AM (#118466)
    > First of all, I don't know if it's me, but the modern skin doesn't display well; I solved it by substituting chrome/modern.jar for an old version. Or just use the Classic theme. > What I'd like to know is how performance is going in Linux and platforms besides Windows. I use the Windows version and it is real fine, but I've heard that other versions are slower. We need more contributors on the Linux side. As always, Windows is the platforms with the most users and hence why development sometimes tend to improve more over there. However, I also believe the Linux (and of course mac) should be made as high priority as Windows is. We can only get there with more contributors! Furthermore, remember that Mozilla is mostly XP (Cross-platform code), which means that the only things that are Linux/Mac/Windows/whatever specific is the backend implementation. Improve that, and all the XP code gets snappier for the platform in question. Now, come over to mozilla.org and read the docs - help us make this browser even faster and less buggy!

  • Re:Opera-like gestures (Score:4)

    by zhensel ( 228891 ) on Saturday June 30, 2001 @09:43AM (#118467) Homepage Journal
    This would be best done as a plug-in rather than detracting from the need to kill the existing mozilla bugs and get to a final product. The lack of a feature is not a bug. Everyone who's voting for 76537 should get together and create a gesture-browsing plug-in rather (in the same way as Total Recall implements crash-recovery).

  • Re:Using 0.9.2 right now (Score:4)

    by hammock ( 247755 ) on Saturday June 30, 2001 @07:51AM (#118477) Homepage
    and there is a fine alternative, Konqueror, if for some reason Netscape/AOL/Time-Warner is prevented from continuing development of Mozilla due to the new anti-GPL/viral clauses in their EULAs.

    Go ahead and prevent further development. I have the source code now and it was licensed to me here [mozilla.org].

    This code is mine now, even if they AOL-ize the next version, I have this one to work from, and I'm sure hundreds of other people who want a superior alternative to Internet Explorer XP are willing to work on it.
  • If you have EVER installed Mozilla before - erase anythign related to it - the executable directory AND the preferences file.

    I have found old pref files cna cause crashes on new versions - this is known since the syntax can change.

    The BEST way to tell if its an old profile blowing up in your face, start Mozilla in profile manager mode (varys on platform I think but usuall something like -Profile or -ProfileManager) Windows should create an icon for it in Start.

    If it starts, delete any existing profiles and create a new one - your life should be much simpler then.

  • I've used Mozilla on and off since the M1x days. It was a challenge, but having never been happy with Outlook or Netscape mail, I found Mozilla's mail client to be very well thought out IMHO. It did everything I needed it to do in a simple easy to follow interface.

    BUt it was REALY unstable - corrupted attachments - hey its beta.

    Well, After I installed Moz 0.9.1 (I think I had .8 before) all I could say was WOW> 0.9.1 has been ultra stable (crashed twice since it came out and I installed it - once on Win 2K and once on Linux) Sites render properly most of the time, the only problem was some gif artifacts when scroling a page. The mail client rocks - I have multiple POP and IMAP accounts going without a glitch.

    Needless to say I switched over to using Mozilla full time for browsing and email with 0.9.1 and have never looked back - something I could not do before due to instability and other bugs.

    Kudos to the Mozilla team - I just installed 0.9.2 and look forward to the improvements! Mozill ahas easily become my browser/email combo of choice!

  • What's better this time out (linux p.o.v.) (Score:5)

    by vondo ( 303621 ) on Saturday June 30, 2001 @07:00AM (#118488)
    I've been using mozilla as my main browser since M16 maybe and my main e-mail app a bit after that. Only with the release of 0.9.1 have I really been able to see the light at the end of the tunnel, a stable 1.0 product that is better than Netscape 4.7 in all ways. (I don't have much experience with IE.)

    Several things are worth mentioning as major improvements recently:

    • MIME type/helper app support: In the past, mozilla was difficult to configure for helper apps, didn't read my .mailcap (still doesn't, but RSN), and was generally a pain in the butt. A lot of work has been going on here recently which means that 0.9.2 is much easier to deal with and 0.9.3 looks to be even better. See bug 78106 [mozilla.org] for an overview of this work.
    • Stability: I don't ever remember 0.9.1 crashing on me (but it might have) and 0.9.2 promises to be even better. If you are having problems in this area, try renaming your ~/.mozilla directory, restarting, and then moving back in just the files you need (bookmarks, cookies, etc). It sucks, but this can sometimes help.
    • Speed: mozilla just keeps getting more and more responsive. It's not as fast as 4.77, never will be since it does so much more, but it is certainly getting better.
    • Autocomplete: Overall better since it seems to match anywhere in the URL, but it does tend to get cluttered up with non-top level URLS.

    Some things still need some work:

    • Printing on linux might be getting better but there are still lots of problems leading to ugly printouts
    • The newsreader doesn't seem to thread entirely properly
    • Perhaps the biggest obstacle to mozilla acceptance is the number of sites that are written with non-standard HTML/JavaScript and fail to render properly with mozilla. If you see this at sites you frequent, file an evangelism bug and send the webmaster e-mail.

    If you haven't tried mozilla recently (since 0.9) you owe it to yourself to download this one and try it out.

  • Macintosh Sidebar bug (Score:3)

    by Tachys ( 445363 ) on Saturday June 30, 2001 @05:29AM (#118503)
    In the Macintosh whenever you launch Mozilla or open a new window the sidebar is open. No matter how I change the settings that sidebar is always open when make a new windows.

    To fix this problem delete the component registary it will make a new one and this problem goes away.

    Mozilla 9.1 one had this problem to I reported it and in about a week the nightly didn't have this problem.

    But it seems this problem has returned.

    BTW, the Mac Mozilla now reads the System "internet plug-ins" folder

  • Re:Quick Launch?? (Score:4)

    by Tachys ( 445363 ) on Saturday June 30, 2001 @06:34AM (#118504)
    Yeah I glad a professional operation like Microsoft would not do anything like that...

    no wait...

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